


The Haunt

by scioscribe



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Curses, F/M, Lima Syndrome, Stockholm Syndrome, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2018-12-19 23:37:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11908590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Willa and Bobo are a riddle to which Constance Clootie is the brutal solution.





	The Haunt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



> Some casual sexism/misogyny and a minor reference to child abuse. Implied one-sided Bobo/Wyatt.

“I’ll remember it for the rest of my life,” Bobo told her once. “The crunch of the snow under our boots as we walk out of Purgatory.”

Once? No, they never did anything once. Anything he told her once, he told her a thousand times.

“Back and back and back I come to you,” he said, with blood matting the fur on the collar of his coat, with the smell of whiskey on his breath, with a crack in his voice, time and time again; when Bobo was agitated, he sounded like Robert, like a dead man, a principled idiot. “No matter what.”

She would ask what had happened and he would tell her. A brawl with another revenant—or he would entertain her by turning still more antiquated, a _fracas_ , a _scuffle_ , a _set-to_ —or an outsider come to knock the crown off his head. She realized, later, that he told her these things because he was teaching her, lesson by lesson, how to wear the crown too. He taught her about cruelty, necessity, love, showmanship. His secondhand copies of Machiavelli: he was adorable.

“The truth is, I’m lucky most of the men Wyatt killed were as short on brains as they were on charm,” Bobo said. “Otherwise, I might have to pay one or two of the sons-of-bitches, instead of just having them at my feet, good little doggies to come when they’re called.”

“Imagine what it will be like to leave them behind,” Willa suggested. “When we leave. Like dropping off a puppy that never stopped pissing on the carpet.”

That particular exchange must have been when she was seventeen or so: passionate and thoroughly on his side, but not aged yet into her own inventiveness, stuck toying with his metaphor like she’d once played dress-up in her mom’s shoes. She would grow into her own: real princesses dream of self-actualization.

“Although the truth is,” Bobo said, more contemplatively, his jaw tight, “there’s always use for a good dog. As Wyatt Earp knew well enough.”

“And a good woman?” Willa said, when the conversation came around again a few years later.

“A good woman more than anything else. And not in the same way as the dog, certainly. You know they say the love of a good woman can save a man who’s gone wrong.” He touched her cheek. “Even a man like me.”

“Am I good?”

“I found you good,” Bobo said, “and nothing I do can ever change you. My perfect Willa. Goodness isn’t something that you lose.”

She guessed he wanted to believe that. He liked it so much when she called him Robert.

Willa said, “What happened to being feared over being loved? Who’s afraid of the big bad good?”

“You’re all questions tonight. Well, ask two questions, get two answers, love: you’ll never have to settle for one thing or another when I’m going to lay the world at your feet, to tremble and tear their hearts out for you, and for the second answer, me. You scare _me_.”

She laughed and curled her fingers into claws, raised her upper lip: the scrunched-up face of some cut-rate _Buffy_ vampire.

It made him laugh too. But he laced his fingers with hers and said no, not that. “No revenant can lay hands on Peacemaker’s purity without getting burned, not even me, and I can hold it longer than most. And you—I worry the curse is waiting to take you away from me. Constance’s last joke, knowing I could leave here with you but never touch you again, not after you become the heir.”

“Fuck Constance,” Willa said. “Interfering witch-bitch. She should be the one worrying about getting burned. Isn’t that what they did with witches?”

But she mulled it over. God knew there was little else for her to think about, no matter what she made him bring her, no matter how she kept graduating, no more Machiavelli, on to bigger and darker things: no Vatican scholar was as familiar with the forbidden books of the world as Willa Earp in her swan’s nest. Sure, some of it was nothing more than play—toys and tightened muscles and nerve endings until he unraveled for her and she understood what the love of a good woman could _really_ do—but not all of it. Not most of it. Willa studied crossroads deals and the demon of vanity who lived in the mirror and the Witch of Dirt and the Witch of Bone. She learned spells and then, more agonizingly, what lay behind spells the way the wiring and the power plant lay behind the light switch.

“Back and back and back I come to you,” Bobo said, his hands on either side of her face, his skin shockingly cold.

“The Earp curse.”

“With you it’s not a curse. It’s just what I am.”

Dumbed-down, magic was nothing more than etymology: what word comes from where, like a thing was the name you gave it. The word woman originally being wife-person, _her_ inseparable from _him_ , irrelevant without him, Schrodinger’s pussy in a treehouse in the lonesome emptiness. Revenant: return. A noun to be conjugated, a verb to be declined. Rules to be obeyed.

“Revenants return,” Willa said.

“That’s right. To you, baby, always to you.”

The funny thing about Bobo was how sentimental he was, and in what an old-fashioned way: a horehound candy at an old-timey general store kind of way, a Wyatt Earp kind of way. He would murder a man and fuck a stripper—she could smell cheap perfume on him sometimes along with the blood which, in Purgatory, came even cheaper—but he would kneel on the floor in front of her and press his forehead to her bare belly and cry and beg her for absolution. Absolution for what?

“You didn’t touch me,” Willa said, stroking his hair. “Nothing you do can ever change me, remember? I’m still an Earp.”

“My beautiful curse-breaker.”

Clootie, demon, husband to the Stone Bitch herself, would never have built a trap door in his curse, no get-out-of-jail-free card—the memory distracted her, the orange of the Monopoly five hundred dollar bills underneath her fingers as she counted and recounted, Waverly putting the top hat in her mouth thinking it was candy—except, Willa knew, magic needed one. Magic had reversals the way the rest of the world had physics. What goes up must come down.

Bobo never talked about what would happen when the curse broke, beyond the snow underneath their boots, beyond the gauzy fantasy of the two of them on top of the world. He was so single-minded. He could play a long game but not a complicated one; Willa learned chess from a book. Then again, Willa learned almost everything from books. Practical experience, except in bed, except in blood, was overrated, something for people without imagination.

One thing Willa had practical experience in was fucking. Fucking, getting fucked, getting fucked over. She felt it gave her a good understanding of Constance fucking Clootie, who couldn’t mind her own business.

What went up had to come down, sure, but what a girl had to think about was the equal and opposite reaction, that was what was tricky.

“Okay, so I’m Constance,” Willa said one night.

Bobo covered his eyes. “Not in bed, please, Willa.”

She smacked him with a pillow. “Be serious, Robert.”

“All right, all right, I’m serious.” He pulled her on top of him, her thighs to either side of his hips, his hands easy and warm on her legs. “I’m listening. So you’re Constance, notwithstanding your striking resemblance to the love of my life.”

Willa smiled. “Notwithstanding that. I’m Constance, and Wyatt Earp has killed my sons. Darling hubby and I want revenge, but he gets there first and gets in the first blow, best blow. He took our sons, so we’ll take his sons and daughters, on and on and on, we’ll make them killers too, and put killers on their conscience.”

“It’s baroque,” Bobo said dryly. “As far as curses go.”

“The revenants have to stay in the Ghost River Triangle because they have to be kept tormenting the Earps. And it’s got to be a fair enough match to keep things interesting, so, only one thing will kill you but you can’t ever really get it away from Earp hands. Checks and balances.” A half-remembered term from a social studies book. “So the curse goes away when the Earp finally kills them all, fine. But to say it all goes away if we walk hand-in-hand in solstice harmony? That doesn’t fit.”

“You have to think about the way it would have worked on Wyatt,” Bobo said. “The only way his family could ever be free, short of killing us all in one go and being as filthy with blood as he thought he was himself was to make all the blood on their hands _innocent_ blood, from revenants getting outside the Triangle.”

Maybe. She didn’t know Constance Clootie’s sweet patootie, as it were, he could have had that kind of mind, to hide the a second necessary reversal inside its own kind of torment. All Bobo ever said of Clootie was that he’d been a nightmare. But Constance had no subtlety. Constance was direct.

Bobo had spent years building her memories of him until she would turn like a key in a lock, so Constance would take those memories away. She was Bobo’s prize delight, so Constance would hand her over to a rival.

If Bobo had come back to the swan’s nest even a minute later—

Willa pictured her head like a snow globe, turned upside down, cold white memories floating everywhere, disorganized. Well, she was safe. Bobo had always kept her safe. Safe from her father, safe from the other revenants, safe from the burden of the curse. It was on her to keep him safe from whatever would happen when they broke it.

“What did Constance do?”

Bobo gave up on snaking his hands further up her legs, his callused thumbs on the soft insides of her thighs suddenly and disappointingly far away, and started rolling himself a cigarette. “In place of a curse, you mean? Something to torment Doc Holliday is the rumor.” He said it so lightly that she knew it wasn’t the whole truth. “Well-chosen. Not to slight your great-great-grandmother, but everybody knew Wyatt only had the one true love.” Not light now but bitter.

“Faithfulness runs in my family,” Willa said. “Unlike yours.”

He put aside the cigarette. “I’m true to you.”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, moving then to get him hard, to take him inside her. “Did you ever love anyone else, Robert?”

“No.” His voice was reverent. He watched her above him. “No, Willa, never. There was never anybody but you.”

“And you—you’re the only person I ever loved.”

“Your sisters—Waverly—”

“Who gives a shit about Waverly?” She leaned forward and sped up the movement of her hips. “It’s always been you. No heavy-handed daddy, no weak mom, no safe little snot-nosed sisters who didn’t have to go through what I went through. Just you.”

She was an Earp and she had only the one true love. And what did Constance Clootie, she of the directness, of the tormented Doc Holliday, of the intimate knowledge of the curlicues of the levers and fulcrums by which her husband’s curse did its heavy, generations-long lifting, have to say about that love, once she’d seen it firsthand? Stood in the swan’s bower and known that swans mate for life? There would be something. There had to be something.

Back and back and back, Willa came to the curse.

Back and back and back, Bobo came to her.

“Fine then,” Constance Clootie had said bitterly. “Live only for yourselves, see if I give a shit.” When she smiled, it crinkled her eyes and tears ran down her face, down her grimly stretched lips. “Enjoy your time together.”

“We will,” Willa said, lifting her chin. “We’re going to be together forever.”

“Sweetheart. Past the Ghost River Triangle, for someone like him, there’s no forever. And certainly not for someone like you. You’ll grow old, and you’ll molder like my boys, and no one will help you.”

“No.”

“No?” Constance’s smile only widened. “Earps always know what they want. Always so goddamn certain. I thought you’d be different, having been living with _that_ for so long, but you’re Wyatt all over again. Smug and self-righteous.”

“I never changed her,” Bobo said. “She’s always my Willa.”

“And always oh-so-very right,” Constance said. “And oh-so-very in your arms. You finally snagged yourself an Earp, Robert, and I do mean that literally. I hope that brings you comfort. Something to cuddle on a cold night.”

“I don’t mind the cold.” And Willa really didn’t: she didn’t know that she had even felt the cold in years. But something about Constance had made her put her arms around herself anyway. “Maybe after the solstice, we’ll go to Aruba.”

“Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, she wants to take you,” Constance had said to Bobo, her voice lilting. “She must have learned that song right out of the _cradle_ to have gotten to it before you got to her. Well, Miss Earp, sure. The solstice. You enjoy your solstice when it comes.”

Magic, words, origins. Solstice: _sol_ , sun, and _sistere_ , to stop. ( _Sistere_ which looked so much like _sister_. Did she care? Did she love? If she didn’t love him, would she leave? But there had never been anywhere to go.)

When the solstice came, they would leave together. Hand in hand. When the sun stopped.

Willa looked out the window. She said, “How long has it been winter? When was my birthday?”

Bobo frowned. He was taking off his coat. He was just arriving—back and back and back—but she couldn’t remember when he had even left her. What she had been doing before he’d come in.

“We must be almost there,” Bobo said. He frowned and then smiled. “Any day now, Willa.”

They made love, and she watched the sun over his shoulder. It didn’t move, and its stillness burned into her eyes, left behind a camera-flash of orange against her eyelids even when she finally looked away. Willa knew enough of magic, and still more of anger, to put together what had happened, what Constance had done to them, trapping them in this fishbowl, making them swim around and around again, forgetting each time that they had seen the plastic castle. The mind—even Bobo had told her this—the mind wasn’t made to deal with immortality. Hell counted on that as much as it did on brimstone.

Be together forever, Constance Clootie had cursed them, but never reach the solstice. Never even reach her birthday.

Forever frozen as the dead girl, the lost girl, the wife, the Penelope. Just the stationary place, he the revenant and she the haunt.

She understood the physics, the equal and opposite reaction, she knew what it would take to break the spell, and it was, indeed, much more direct than Clootie’s husband’s exit for Wyatt: no future generations, no calendar date. Just this: have a lover’s nest forever unfixed in time or else... have hate, end immortality, and see things move.

And it was Bobo Constance needed, and Willa Constance hated, so the joke of it, from one perspective, was that the game was rigged: Bobo could kill her but she couldn’t kill him, not without Peacemaker. Goddamn Wyatt Earp. Even if she wanted to live outside of this stickiness, this stretch of days frozen in amber, she couldn’t.

Make a virtue of necessity, then, and say she didn’t want to. He was her Robert, after all. And, looked at another way, she had the last laugh, because if she knew one thing—the only thing life, outside of books, had ever given to her—she knew he loved her, adored her, needed her. He would never do what needed to be done.

Down on his knees, he said, “I would do anything to be the man you deserve,” his voice raw.

“Shh,” Willa said. “It’s all right, Robert. It’s fine. You never hurt me. We’re together, and that’s all that matters.”

She petted the hair of the man the witch had kept her from ever saving and the monster the witch had kept her from ever killing.

She was never going to be the hero after all.


End file.
